SKL 104Guide
How memory works, and what that means for revision
Encoding, storage and retrieval explained without neuroscience jargon, followed by the four practical consequences for how you should study.
The collection · 412 catalogued items
Learning library
The library holds every guide, reference sheet and curated collection we publish, shelved under six category codes. Use the filters to narrow the view, or the search box in the header to jump straight to a title. Everything is free to read, free to print, and dated so you can see how current it is.
How the collection is arranged
Each item carries a call number made of three letters and three digits. The letters give the category; the digits place the item within it, roughly from introductory to advanced. A guide numbered AWR 214 sits in academic writing, at intermediate level. Reference sheets use REF, reading lists use RDG, and printable materials use TPL, WKS or EXR and live in the Practice Centre.
Guides
412Long-form explanatory articles, each reviewed at least annually.
Reference sheets
37One- and two-page summaries for keeping beside you while working.
Collections
14Curated groups of guides assembled around a single situation.
Median reading time
16 minMost guides are designed to be finished in one sitting.
The six shelves
What is on each shelf
Choosing a shelf link below filters the catalogue underneath to that category.
SKL · Study skills
Reading, note-taking, memory and assessment. The shelf to start on if you are not sure what you need — most learners find their real problem described somewhere in the first ten items.
AWR · Academic writing
Thesis, structure, paragraphs, sources, citation and revision. The largest shelf, because writing is where most learners can see their difficulty but not name it.
RES · Research skills
Questions, searching, evaluation, record-keeping and ethics. Written with academic librarians, and aimed at projects rather than single assignments.
TIM · Time management
Auditing, estimating, planning and recovering. Deliberately the shortest shelf: the items are brief because the people who need them are short of time.
CRT · Critical thinking
Arguments, evidence, statistics and reasoning failures. Every item includes practice extracts with annotated answers, because this is a skill nobody acquires by reading about it.
DGL · Digital learning
Online courses, video notes, shared documents, attention and generative tools. The fastest-changing shelf, and the one reviewed most often.
Browse
Featured guides by category
A selection from each shelf. Choose a category to narrow the list.
SKL 112Guide
Cornell notes: the full method
The page layout, what belongs in each region, and the five-minute review that makes the format worth using at all.
SKL 118Guide
Reading a dense academic text
A three-pass approach to journal articles: survey, argument, detail. Includes a margin-marking system and worked examples from three disciplines.
SKL 121Guide
Active recall for people who hate testing themselves
Why retrieval feels unpleasant, why that feeling is the mechanism rather than a side effect, and six low-friction ways to start.
SKL 133Reference
Study session structures compared
Pomodoro, 50/10, 90-minute blocks and free-form sessions, with the situations each suits and the evidence for each.
SKL 140Guide
Revision planning from the exam backwards
Turning a syllabus into a confidence checklist, then converting that checklist into a dated calendar with slack built in.
AWR 201Guide
From topic to thesis
How to read an assignment question as an instruction, and how to move from a subject you find interesting to a claim someone could dispute.
AWR 214Guide
Building a paragraph that argues
Claim, evidence, interpretation, link. One paragraph revised four times, with commentary on what each revision fixed.
AWR 222Guide
Quotation, paraphrase and summary
Choosing between the three deliberately, integrating each grammatically, and avoiding the accidental plagiarism that comes from careless notes.
AWR 230Reference
Citation styles compared: APA, MLA, Chicago
Side-by-side examples for eleven source types, plus a short explanation of why each discipline chose the conventions it did.
AWR 241Guide
Revising structurally before revising sentences
The reverse outline: reduce your own draft to one sentence per paragraph and see whether the argument still stands up.
AWR 255Guide
Writing a literature review that reviews
Organizing by disagreement rather than by author, and the four moves that turn a summary into an argument about the state of a field.
RES 301Guide
Turning an interest into a researchable question
Scope, feasibility and the test that matters most: could a reasonable person answer this differently with the same evidence?
RES 302Guide
Judging the quality of a source
A checklist that goes past peer review: funding, method, sample, measurement, and the limitations the authors state themselves.
RES 311Guide
Database searching for people who use search engines
Boolean operators, controlled vocabulary, truncation and field limits, with a worked search recorded step by step so you can reproduce it.
RES 320Guide
Keeping a research record you can still read in six months
One entry per source, five fields, no exceptions. Includes the failure modes of tagging systems and why fewer categories usually work better.
RES 334Guide
Research ethics for undergraduate projects
Consent, anonymity, data storage and honest reporting, written for small projects rather than for institutional review boards.
RES 340Reference
Primary, secondary and tertiary sources
The distinction as it is actually applied in history, the sciences and law, with examples of sources that change category depending on the question.
TIM 401Guide
The seven-day time audit
How to log a week without changing it, what the four common patterns look like, and which of them are worth acting on.
TIM 404Guide
Designing a weekly timetable that survives
Fixed commitments, study blocks, and the unassigned block that absorbs the week’s inevitable disruption.
TIM 407Guide
The two-hour weekly review
A fixed short agenda for closing last week and shaping the next. The brevity is the reason the habit tends to survive.
TIM 410Guide
Deciding what not to do
Why unmade decisions cost the same attention as unfinished tasks, and how to write an explicit list of this term’s omissions.
TIM 412Guide
Recovering a plan after a bad week
The recovery protocol: triage, re-date, forgive, resume. Written because abandonment after a single missed week is the most common failure we see.
TIM 421Guide
Studying around shift work and caring responsibilities
Written with our adult-learner advisory group. Short irregular blocks, portable materials, and planning that assumes interruption rather than resenting it.
CRT 511Guide
Separating a claim from its evidence
Taking a paragraph apart into what is asserted, what supports it and what is assumed. Fifteen practice extracts with annotated answers.
CRT 516Guide
Correlation, causation and the space between them
Confounding, reverse causation and selection, explained with examples from published research rather than invented ones.
CRT 518Guide
Reading statistics without being led
Axes, baselines, denominators, relative versus absolute change, and the honest chart that still misleads.
CRT 524Guide
Assumptions and what they carry
How to find the unstated premise an argument depends on, and how to test it without simply asserting the opposite.
CRT 530Reference
Informal fallacies as diagnosis
Sixteen common reasoning failures, each with a plain-language explanation of what has gone wrong — more useful in an essay than the Latin name.
CRT 535Guide
Writing a critique of the strongest version
Steel-manning as an academic habit: stating a position so its holder would accept the statement, and only then objecting.
DGL 601Guide
Taking notes from video lectures
Why pausing beats rewinding, how to timestamp instead of transcribe, and what to do with a recording you will never rewatch.
DGL 604Guide
Running a distraction audit
Measure which interruptions actually cost you a session instead of banning devices wholesale. Most learners find two or three real culprits.
DGL 612Guide
Using generative tools without outsourcing the thinking
Where a language model genuinely supports learning, where it removes the productive difficulty learning depends on, and how to tell the difference before you start.
DGL 618Guide
Working in shared documents without losing the thread
Version discipline, comment etiquette and the division of labour that stops group projects becoming one person’s project.
DGL 625Reference
Evaluating an online course before you enrol
Eight questions to ask about assessment, support, currency and completion rates, plus what a completion rate does and does not tell you.
DGL 631Guide
Digital note systems: what to expect and what not to
Linked notes, folders and tags compared honestly. The system matters less than whether you revisit what you wrote, which most people do not.
Curated groups
Learning collections
Collections gather guides from several categories around one situation. They are shorter than a study path and carry no schedule — read them in any order.
COL 019 guides
Your first term at university
Reading loads, lecture notes, referencing basics, and what academic staff mean by phrases such as “critically evaluate”. Assembled for learners in the first eight weeks of a degree.
COL 047 guides
Returning to study after time away
Translating professional experience into academic habits, rebuilding reading stamina, and the specific anxieties adult learners report most often.
COL 0611 guides
Writing a dissertation
Question, literature, method, structure and the long middle where most projects stall. Includes a realistic twelve-month timeline.
COL 086 guides
Studying a quantitative subject
Worked-example dependency, problem sets as retrieval practice, and why re-reading a solved problem is close to useless.
COL 108 guides
Learning a language independently
Spacing, comprehensible input, output practice and the plateau at intermediate level that ends most self-directed attempts.
COL 135 guides
Supporting a learner as a parent or tutor
How to help without doing the work, what feedback actually improves performance, and the difference between encouragement and pressure.
Take it with you
Educational downloads
Reference material formatted for printing and for offline reading. All files are plain, unwatermarked and free of tracking.
| Call number | Title | Format | Pages | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| REF 01 | Study methods summary card | PDF, A4 & Letter | 2 | June 2026 |
| REF 04 | Citation quick reference (APA, MLA, Chicago) | PDF, A4 & Letter | 4 | June 2026 |
| REF 07 | Source evaluation checklist | PDF, A4 & Letter | 1 | May 2026 |
| REF 09 | Common assignment task verbs, defined | PDF, A4 & Letter | 2 | March 2026 |
| REF 12 | Argument mapping notation | PDF, A4 & Letter | 2 | February 2026 |
| REF 15 | Revision interval calculator (printable table) | PDF, A4 & Letter | 1 | April 2026 |
| REF 18 | Reading log with comprehension prompts | PDF, A4 & Letter | 2 | January 2026 |
| REF 21 | Glossary of academic terms for new students | PDF, A4 & Letter | 6 | May 2026 |
Requesting an alternative format
Any item in the library can be supplied as large print, plain text, or a tagged accessible PDF at no cost. Write to info@examit.club with the call number and the format you need; we aim to respond within five business days. See our accessibility statement for the full commitment.